Hercule Poirot is dragged out of retirement to investigate the murder of a famous medium during a séance at a haunted palazzo. (Note: for my plot-re-cap go here)
“I talk to ghosts all the time. They say you’re a fake.” says the hilariously precocious young Leopold, who prefers Edgar Allan Poe to parties and calls out esteemed medium Joyce Reynolds in irrefutable fashion.
Kenneth Branagh’s atmospheric, enjoyably melodramatic A Haunting In Venice may be set at Halloween (it’s a very loose adaptation of Agatha Christie’s little-known Poirot mystery Halllowe’en Story) but Christmas is also known for ghosts and general spookiness, and this works rather well as a festive treat: the darkness cut through with glowing golden lights, the awkward personalities stuck together when everyone wants to leave, even, if you’ve been in the UK this month, a seemingly endless storm.
I wasn’t overly impressed with Branagh’s first two outings as the famous Belgian Detective Hercule Poirot, but I do love Christie, and both Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile had something going for them — usually the sets and costumes, admittedly. There are a couple of big hitters in the style takes in this one, though mostly it’s so gloomy any fashion flourishes are likely missed; luckily while I hate gloom (I am the queen of “big lights”), I do love a list, and so it turns out does Poirot.
We’re in Venice in 1947, just two years after the end of WW2, many of the continent’s citizens still haunted by what they have seen and why they have escaped.
Now retired, Hercule Poirot has hired a bodyguard to keep people away from him, though he cannot avoid being disturbed by old acquaintance Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a successful mystery novelist now enduring a run of unexpected flops. Ariadne invites Poirot to a séance at a reputedly haunted palazzo owned by opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly); Rowena wants to reach her daughter Alicia, who died by suicide when her fiancé left her.
The medium is Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), world-renowned for her ability to speak to the dead. Ariadne, usually a sceptic, claims she needs Poirot to debunk the impressive Joyce lest Ariadne herself become a believer. Really she wants material for a new book, preferably involving a finally-flummoxed Poirot.
The palazzo has a grim history: previously an orphanage, the doctors and nurses looking after the children had abandoned them when plague swept the city, locking them in to die. The children’s ghosts are now said to haunt the building — as Leopold (Jude Hill) says confidently at the end, those who die in the palazzo always return. Which means more ghosts, as first the medium then two more meet their end, all on Halloween night.
Joyce sweeps into the Palazzo in a Venetian mask and cloak. While she is quickly exposed as a fraud by Poirot, she then appears to become possessed, claiming Alicia was murdered. Alone with Poirot she all but admits her fakery, stalking out after draping him in her own mask and cloak. Moments later she is dead, pushed from a balcony and impaled on a statue in the courtyard below. Poirot prevents anyone from leaving the Palazzo, while outside a violent storm is whipping up and the Venetian canals beginning to churn.
The suspects are many, and that’s before you include the dead plague orphans: Rowena (Reilly is like a 1940s Princess Di, all breathy head tilts, hidden steeliness and secrets), her doctor Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), a man unable to cope after liberating the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the war; Leopold, Ferrier’s young son; Rowena’s housekeeper, the highly superstitious Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin with the film’s most moving performance); Ariadne; Joyce’s assistants, Desdemona (a wonderful Emma Laird) and Nicholas Holland (Ali Khan), Romany siblings who lost their family in the war and wish only to make it to Missouri; Alicia’s fiancé Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen), summoned to the séance with a mysterious unsigned note; and Poirot’s bodyguard Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio, yes the whiny bad guy from John Wick: Chapter 2).
A pallor seems to hover over several slumped in the twilight of their careers. Ferrier can’t work due to his PTSD, Portfoglio has given up his police career, Rowena no longer sings. Others find death has given them a new lease of life: Poirot, finding his mojo as he’s dragged out of retirement, the remarkably bouncy Leopold, entirely at ease with his ghost stories and undead friends. The elegance of Yeoh’s Joyce Renolds, at the top of her game making up ghosts for an audience that mostly wants to guess how she does it, contrasts with the frumpiness of Fey’s Ariadne, a mystery author on the slide, whose audience is starting to tire of guessing whodunnit.
With no outside light the palazzo feels like a damp subterranean underworld, its faded, peeling teal walls and the painted-on fronds in Alicia’s bedroom a reminder of the storm-tossed canals outside. It has always been a prison — for the plague children, for the impecunious Rowena, and now for the guests. In this already rattling, shadowy house come repeated shots from above and below, showing characters squished down and boxed in by the dark walls around them. It adds to the claustrophobia though it can feel too much, such headache-inducing forced intensity, especially when one is trying to work out whodunnit.
Jump scares are of the traditional variety: a ghost in a mirror (though with a millisecond’s pause, where we think “he’s not really going to have a ghost in a mirror is he?”) and enormous crashing doors.
As a nicely unnerving Christmas diversion A Haunting In Venice works just fine, if you ignore attempts at the end to claim a supernatural win. It’s already a thread running through the film and doesn’t need pointedly posing in the closing frames. The earthly reasons already given for the weird happenings are too strong for that, and the true, haunting horrors of the story (Alicia’s murder, Ferrier’s wartime memories, the abandoning of the plague children) are the mundane evils of living people, not dead ones.
And actually the dull calm of the following day, as survivors move on, shows how easily a dark and stormy night and a bare-bones ghost story on repeat can turn most of us into believers — and that’s before adding hallucinogenic poisons, a plague child’s skeleton and a magnetic typewriter into the mix.
A Haunting in Venice is streaming on Disney Plus.
Read my article: Whodunnit or woohoodunnit? A Haunting In Venice explained
Watch the trailer for A Haunting In Venice: